‘No,’ I shouted furiously, crazedly at Pirou. ‘Go right … starboard … away from the rock.’
Of course there was no chance that he would do so.
Seizing the metal bar again, and keeping one hand on the tiller, he lashed out at me, and missed. People were looking at us now. I grasped the bar with both hands and prised it from his grasp to give him some of his own medicine. I swung, the vessel lurched, and I caught him on the shoulder – a glancing blow, but it still hurt him. He launched himself at me and we wrestled on the floor of the castle. He had chosen the wrong man to wrestle with, though. I put him in a lock and threw him down the stairs. A sack of carrots would have landed better, and the stuffing was knocked out of him. He was at least out of the way for the moment.
I grasped the tiller. Everyone could see the tip of the rock now, flecked with foam, about thirty yards ahead on the left. People were shouting at me:
‘Hard a-starboard or you’ll have us all drowned!’
I knew what to do now.
Pirou, had resurfaced sooner than I expected and now, sporting a bloody head, even he seemed to have caught the general frenzy. He fought like a madman with me to put his hand once again upon the tiller, and I fought as madly to restrain him.
‘Hard a-port,’ he shouted.
‘Hard a-starboard!’ shouted the mate, starting to clamber up the stairs, gasping for breath.
I was overcome with a stupid confusion, forgetting everything FitzStephen had tried to teach me. Did I push the tiller right to go right? Was that what hard a-starboard meant? Why was I, a landlubber, in this stupid position, in charge of three hundred people?
I had time for only one move and I made the wrong one. I pushed the tiller hard over to the right and Pirou, hurt though he was, clapped his hands.
And then the White Ship struck. It was as if the very earth had cracked.
We hit the rock with a great, coarse, rending wooden cry of pain. I had fulfilled my promise to Juliana perfectly, and Alice and I were free.
For a moment, there was silence from all the people on board, disbelief, and then commotion and fear spreading like an instant disease. For a start, there was a great deal of very cold water. The mate and I struggled through the panicking crowd to try and see what the damage was – it might be possible to staunch the hole and limp back to shore – but the ship was holed below the waterline, planks were shattered and there was no warp on earth could repair that wound.
I started sloshing about the boat, apologizing.
‘I’m sorry,’ I kept saying. ‘Hard a-starboard.’
‘Are we sinking?’
‘What can we do?’
‘Will they send someone from the shore?’
‘We’re all going to die!’
‘Christ have mercy!’
And so on. I was so overwhelmed by guilt, shame, and confusion I did not think of my own danger.
While the general confusion reigned, I noticed the Prince’s personal guard, appointed by the King himself, men of fierce loyalty and military presence of mind, scouring the ship for anything that might float. They quickly located Perrine and brought her round to the side. I knew what had happened to the other little boat; Pirou must have scrambled into it and was sculling home even now. He would not get far against that tide, not with that wounded paw.
I was still in a state of shock. I could not believe that I had been responsible for this disaster, and yet here they all were, spluttering around like goldfish in the remnants of a broken bowl.
The ship was sinking lower in the water and beginning to list. Stability wasn’t helped by too many people trying to climb up onto the castles to get away from the danger. The bow was now under water, lodged precariously on ledges of the rock, and slipping. There were already people in the sea, some swimming, others floundering; no one could last long in that cold. The little boat with the Prince and four men aboard, including the Prince’s half-brother, Richard, was already some twenty yards away.
It was just at that point that a piteous voice cried out:
‘William … don’t leave me…’
It was my little stepmother, the lovely Comtesse de Perche, calling more in love than fear.
The Prince, on hearing her voice, immediately ordered his oarsmen to row back and collect her. The guard demurred. I could see them arguing against it. It was obvious what would happen if they obeyed, but the Prince was insistent, I will say that for him. He loved that girl to the end. So they rowed back. When they reached the side of the ship she stepped on board, but as they turned the boat to row away again, a myriad hands like the tentacles of a great octopus, reached up out of the water and clung to the side of the little skiff … And of course my brave little Perrine turned on her side. Then they were all in the water: Prince, Comtesse, and the bravest of the brave.
I saw William clutch the little Comtesse to him and they sank together, beyond the reach of his tutor Othuer, who had leapt from the ship to succour him. I made the sign of the Cross and prayed that God would not punish them for I knew more about the impossibility of love than I had when I first saw them.
It was all at once borne upon me that I now had no escape plan for myself. Perrine was gone. The ship quivered, slid down a little more, the mast cracked and toppled over the side in a welter of sail and sheets. It was time to leave. I saw a spar floating nearby. I huddled my coat about me and jumped into the water. I tried to call out for someone to join me on my spar, but the cold took my voice away.
At this point, the weight of the people in the ship’s castles – proud innovation of FitzStephen – made the ship capsize. The whole party was flung into the sea. The air was full of the despairing cries of drowning men and women, sounding like seabirds. I looked around desperately for the little girl who had smiled at me, because I wanted to save her for being so nice, but I could see her nowhere.
‘Hélène! Hélène!’
I tried to paddle round the ship as I called her, but it began to slide off the rock and with shocking speed disappeared into the ocean, almost carrying me with it. The whole thing was so completely unreal that I could not believe it had happened. People were drowning all around me. A bedraggled wretch swam up and asked if he could share my spar.
‘Yes, peasant,’ I said, smiling to show I welcomed the company.
It was the same proud young baron who had insulted my sheepskin coat.
‘This is a terrible thing,’ he said. ‘The King will never recover.’
‘I’m not sure any of us will.’
I was finding, to my surprise, that my coat which now gathered itself up around me on the surface like a skirt, actually helped me to float. Perhaps, I thought, with its fatty skin, it would even help to keep me warm. It did not help to keep me dry though, and the cold – fatty skin or not – soon penetrated to the very marrow. Our spar was drifting on the ebb, away from the rock. There had been a moment when I wondered whether to repeat my late survival stratagem of sitting on the Quilleboeuf, but I saw there was someone there already, looking very disinclined to be removed. And when I looked again there was a fight. And when I looked once more there was no one on it at all. It was, anyway, too far from me now.
I stayed where I was with my companion beside me, hanging onto the spar. We exchanged names and some little information. Bodies floated past us, some alive and feebly struggling, others white and still, here a beautiful woman, there one of the King’s Guard, there the jester rolled up like a woodlouse on a half-full hogshead. Among these motionless bodies, I perceived the Prince again, yielded up by the water and torn from the arms of his love, in the embrace now of his bastard half-brother, the great general Richard who must have found him, momentarily buoyed up by the bubbles in his clothes. I wondered for a moment whether to try to collect the Prince and anchor him to the spar, and I questioned my companion as to whether it should be done.
‘Let him be,’ said Geoffrey. ‘The King will not thank you for bringing his son back dead. In fact he will secretly ha
te you for it. Better to let the waters take him and yield him up on the shore if fate wills it.’
The Prince and his brother sank under the water as I watched. It entered my mind now, slowly, because the cold made everything slow, that Juliana had hedged her bets. She had not completely trusted me. The other party had been there on her command…
‘What fools we were,’ exclaimed Geoffrey, ‘and how the wheel of fortune turns. I fear I will not last the night, Bertold. I feel the cold entering my heart. Will you tell my father that I loved and honoured him to the end, if you survive?’
‘I will. But I am certain you will endure. I will make you endure.’
My companion shook his head.
‘I will try, I promise. I am not anxious to die out here. But it is cold. It is so cold. This night has been like the end of the world.’
The effort of speaking had exhausted him and he sank back against the spar. There was a slight commotion not far off, as though someone were swimming inexpertly towards us. Then, poor FitzStephen appeared out of the gloom, splashing like a dog, a sad woebegone figure whose dream had been broken and who still could not get the words out fast enough …
‘I have l … l … lost the Prince. Is he a … l … l … live?’
‘He is dead,’ I told him. ‘We saw him go.’
‘I have lost everything, I cannot live now,’ he said, and put his head down, under the water, where he stayed.
Slowly, as the chill tightened its grip on us, the last desperate sounds abated and the bodies floating past became infrequent. Hours must have passed; we were numb with cold and half dead with shock and exhaustion. I tried to stay awake because I knew if I did not, I would never wake up again. I kept shaking Geoffrey to try to keep him with me, but I could see he was not in good shape. And so we drifted until there was no vestige left of the White Ship and the three hundred people on board, only Geoffrey de L’Aigle and I, the bastard FitzRotrou, heir now to the county of Perche and feeling no better for it.
LXXII
I was losing the sense of cold now, and a kind of sleep enfolded me. I was no longer afraid, and still I floated on. I passed out again, and remained in a kind of stupor, falling in and out of consciousness, a half-world or threshold which must have persisted for some time. In that sort of state, you begin to lose the person you are – or were – and I was not sorry to lose myself completely; it seemed an encumbrance.
‘Bertold! Bertold!’
Who was that?
I opened my eyes and a man’s face filled my vision – young, distraught, exhausted, deathly pale, at the end of his tether. I was surprised to find it was this man who was shaking me and shouting a name.
‘Thank God,’ he cried, ‘you are still alive’.
I looked beyond and around him and saw an endless vista of cold, dark sea, punctuated by an occasional lump of rock. I looked down and saw that we two were crudely fastened, by the boy’s golden cloak, to a spar big enough to cling to but not to sustain our weight. One or two pieces of wood were floating nearby along with other cumbersome, bobbing objects, which I saw were bodies; the dead coming back to us for company.
I could not feel my own body any more, but I found there was something thick and familiar around me, pliable and ice-cold, helping me float. Very slowly, like an old mill-wheel in a slack stream, my brain turned. Ah yes. It was my sheepskin coat, which they had all mocked me for when I came aboard, the courtiers and the pretty girls. And I remembered who I was and how I came to be here.
I was Bertold, the account-keeper of Haimo Labouchère, the King’s butcher of Rouen, on an errand to collect debts before their owners could run away to England. My companion was Geoffrey de l’Aigle, son of the powerful Comte of Vexin and Earl of Lincoln, one of Duke Henry’s generals in Normandy. And we were in the sea, about two miles off Barfleur, our vessel – the fastest and newest and safest in Christendom – having struck a rock and sunk in ten minutes, leaving just the two of us from a total of more than three hundred people on board.
Just at that moment, I saw Geoffrey’s head fall forward into the water. He had spent what little strength he had trying to save me. I found a new reserve of energy and redoubled my efforts to keep Geoffrey awake, telling him jokes, making him sing, repeating old stories, telling him how I got into all this, even the bits about Juliana’s revenge. His response was sluggish.
‘You have to try harder, Geoffrey. You must have told jokes in your father’s hall. What gave the sieve a hernia?’
But his head fell forward on his chest, until I beat him on the shoulder.
‘Wake up, you silly bugger. Geoffrey!’ I cried, resorting to the same tactics he had employed, slapping him on the cheeks, pulling him up in the water.
He opened his eyes, it seemed with an enormous effort, the lids heavy as portcullises.
I stopped, it was kinder to let him die. And then all at once, he said:
‘Fish supper.’
I thought about it for a while. That was not what gave the sieve a hernia. I must say that my own responses were beginning to slow right down again.
‘When we get home,’ I told him, humouring the poor boy.
‘We are,’ he said, and gave me the most beautiful smile. Then his hands lost their grip on the spar and he started to sink.
‘Geoffrey,’ I cried. ‘Geoffrey!’
‘You will tell him, won’t you?’ he said. ‘My father …’
‘I will tell him.’
He tried to smile, and then he just started to slip away into the water, sliding through my arms. He was the son of a powerful count and I was a bastard, working as a book-keeper for a butcher, but I wept as though he had been my own brother.
With all my remaining strength, I hung on to him and tried to haul him back, but I was too weak and the sea was too hungry. He was dead; I let go and he sank like a sword. I wept until I could weep no more and I had salted the whole sea. I wept more for him than for all the dead people I had sailed with who now lay scattered over the deep, and I thought of the wickedness of Juliana who had killed so many people in her pursuit of revenge.
‘Happy now?’ I called.
I was not altogether surprised to receive a distant answering cry; anything was possible, it seemed to me, in this night of madness. My state of exhaustion and shock made me ready to admit anything natural or supernatural, a hulk or cog from Barfleur or the imp Merle in a foggy cloud.
‘Happy now?’
Something struck me on the head – a floating spar, a cask lifted by a wave – and I must have passed out for some moments. It was good there where I was and I hung on to it … until I woke from comfortable oblivion to the cheerless light of dawn and the outrageous smell of salt water, which hits you like a brick when it means to kill you. I was still in the water, but with someone slapping my face. It crossed my mind that this was like being born again, something I didn’t want to be doing..
‘Wake up, wake up,’ someone was shouting in a funny voice.
My God, I was being born again. It was true, I felt like crying. Slowly I took in the scene around me.
The sea was full of bodies again. Currents, which had scattered the dead, had now twirled them back again in some kind of contredanse macabre. It was a ghastly sight for the fishermen who had appeared out of the morning mist, crossing themselves and making exclamations of horror and pity.
‘Poor souls!’
‘Oh my God!’
‘Christ have mercy!’
They had seen me as a floating corpse among all the other dead, this one in an old sheepskin coat – and then someone noticed a faint movement. It made them realise that maybe I was still alive, and with rough attentiveness, they lifted me up as though I were a halibut and put me in the bottom of a smack, along with five crabs – maybe one was my old friend from the Quillleboeuf rock – a lobster and ten pilchards and a load of mackerel. And that is how I came, shivering uncontrollably, once more to Barfleur.
LXXIII
I had been convinced, w
hen I’d thought about it before, that in the event of my survival, Alice would be waiting for me on the shore. I imagined that Juliana would have brought her to me in a gesture of gratitude – but Alice was not there. I did have the feeling, though, that she was waiting for me somewhere. I needed to get back and find her, and meet the bump that was my child. But I was barely alive.
Soon a congregation of lately arrived, rearguard soldiers and lords who had not sailed, along with local officials, started to gather about me like gulls, and surveyed my huddled figure as the fishermen debated what to do with me. Finally, they took me to the harbourmaster’s office and laid me upon the floor against a cupboard. I promised to reward my rescuers when I was sufficiently recovered. Someone produced a blanket. Someone else found some strong wine and tipped it down my throat.
Stephen of Mortain, the King’s nephew – a tall, pale-faced man whose drooping moustaches gave him a mournful expression – made the first move. He seemed to have recovered miraculously from his diarrhoea, and swooped upon me accusingly as I lay and shivered. I was the only survivor of the wreck and therefore, by implication, the perpetrator – a logical assumption which happened to be true. As I blurted out my tale, however, leaving out all mention of the fight with Pirou (he might have been Stephen’s man, and then where would I be?), it seemed that he changed his view. I had a perfect reason for being on board: money for my boss. I was clearly a simple fellow. I had survived because I was dressed in the uniform of my trade. The reason for the wreck was what I was gulping now – strong wine and too much of it. There was nothing for it, he said, but I must go to England and tell the King.
The White Ship Page 41